Jeb Bush doesn't have Romney's vote locked up: Column

2012 candidate hints Republicans must look to a new conservative reformer for 2016.

Former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, pictured at a public lecture last week, announced today that he will not attempt a third campaign for the White House, encouraging the party to find a strong reformer for 2016.(Photo: Rogelio V. Solis, AP)

Even before Mitt Romney finished announcing that he would not run for president in 2016, the conventional wisdom had formed: Establishment moderates Jeb Bush and Chris Christie are the primary beneficiaries. One theory should have received more attention.

This theory holds that a Romney run for the nomination probably would have made it more difficult for a lesser-known conservative reformer (perhaps Scott Walker or Marco Rubio?) to win the nomination, so Romney's announcement eases the path for the reform candidate, not the establishment representative.

"I believe that one of our next generation of Republican leaders, one who may not be as well known as I am today, one who has not yet taken their message across the country, one who is just getting started, may well emerge as being better able to defeat the Democrat nominee," Romney said. "In fact, I expect and hope that to be the case."

These do not sound like the words of Jeb Bush's golf buddy. They express the sentiments of the Republican base, which hungers for an anti-establishment fighter who will make it his mission to simultaneously defeat the Democrats and remake the GOP. Mitt Romney, of all people, just said to Republicans: "Find that person."

He also hinted: "I already have found him."

Which of the potential Republican contenders fits Romney's description? Many could make the claim, depending on how broadly one defines the word "conservative," but retired two-term governor Jeb Bush is not one of them.

The notion that Romney's exit positions Bush to be the default nominee is based entirely on the premise that Bush can raise the most money and the candidate who raises the most money wins. But the political graveyard is filled with presumptive front-runners who raised more money than the upstarts who better understood the mood of the electorate.

Here in New Hampshire, Romney remains broadly well liked. He has the personal relationships and the organizational infrastructure to have entered the race as the 800 pound gorilla in boat shoes. (In Iowa, that is not the case.) With him out of the running, those operatives, activists and voters are up for grabs. If Romney's sense of who the next nominee should be was shaped by the feedback he got from his own supporters, then that is another indication that the likely next nominee is not a big-name, big-money safe bet, but someone whose name would barely register in a national poll today.

Andrew Cline is editorial page editor of the New Hampshire Union Leader. You can follow him on Twitter @Drewhampshire.